This is fourth of nine essays contained within the first issue of the Adult Analysis Anthology, an experimental collection of longform writing that seeks to expand the breadth of critical discourse around adult games and adult game culture. We will be posting a new essay every Wednesday from now until March, but if you would like to read all the essays early and support the creation of more high-quality writing about adult games the full anthology is available for purchase on Itch! Anthology logo by @pillowkisser!
By: @JuniperTheory
The modern era of media is defined by many things, but perhaps more than anything it’s defined by horrifying scale. Games are no exception to this; last year a whopping 12,529 games were released on steam. If you played one hour of each it’d take you almost a year and a half of 24/7 play to try every single one, and that’s JUST games released in 2022. With this much media coming out every day, we usually focus on the few we find value in to sift them out of the rough.
But what if we didn’t? What if instead of looking at only a few interesting games, we evaluated the whole medium to look for patterns? By observing games with similar engines, art styles, genres, or even publishers we can discover specific trends and answer some puzzling questions. It also allows us to find games we might have otherwise overlooked due to the sheer volume of media produced every day.
Steam created the Adults Only category on its platform in 2018, and since then it’s become a strange home for porn. Of the games released in 2022, a full 13% (946) of them used this tag. Many other storefronts exist for erotic games, but I find steam to be a particularly interesting case study for two reasons. Firstly, selling a game on Steam comes with a $100 initial fee. to be sold there. This means that every game we look at had a minimum buy in; even the least substantial games are there because someone thinks they can make that money back.
Secondly, steam has a mass-market focus that other distribution platforms lack. Games on Steam tend to be marketed to the lowest common denominator of gamer, with no separation to be found between indie NSFW experiments and AAA games once purchased. Its reduction of everything down to one storefront makes it perhaps the most nakedly capitalist platform, the easiest for those just trying to make money off their art.
That’s why I searched for every pornographic, erotic, kinky, or similarly adult game that released an English-language version between June 1st and July 14th of this year (2023), a total of 105 games. I then looked for trends in gameplay, presentation, publisher/developers, or anything else to help sort them into some categories. Additionally, I used the Steam Next Fest (an annual demo showcase) to try out a few games and get a better idea of what they are.
The categories I came up with were:
- 27 3D Visual Novels
- 14 Traditional Games
- 14 Tile Match Games
- 14 Non-3D Visual Novels
- 10 RPGmaker games
- 9 Jokes/Low-Effort Games
- 7 Barely Qualifying Traditional Games
- 4 Sex Simulators
- 3 Uncategorizable
- 2 Non-Games
- 1 Interactive Fiction
3D Visual Novels: 3D visual novels not only released almost twice as frequently in this time, they all used the same asset store and posing software, Daz3d. It allows devs to purchase a few models and pose them quickly for easy visual novel art, and then strip the models naked and pose them for a porn scene. This also unfortunately leads to these games having a near identical look to their lighting, character models, and effects. This isn’t to say that there’s no value to be found here, some do try to tell interesting stories! However, they’re outnumbered by extremely simplistic games where you click through a few scenes of posed figurines and bad writing to get to a few scenes of posed naked figurines and bad sex writing. The ease of use also lets studios mass produce these games; 7 of the 27 were made by one singular studio called EroticGamesClub.
Tile Match Games: This category can barely be classified as “games”, being mostly hentai images hidden behind insignificant memory or tile swapping puzzles. While there’s not much to talk about with these, I will note that 5/14 of them were made by the same studio called LTZinc, with other studios also producing large numbers of these near identical games. This makes it easy to block large swathes of them on Steam, which was useful as this category also had the most AI-generated art. One particularly disturbing game simply copy-pasted AI-generated anime faces onto even worse AI-generated 3d naked ladies for some truly awful art.
Jokes/Low-Effort Games: Steam’s hands-off approach has also lead to another awful yet fascinating category: quick asset flips and annoying, often racist joke games that simply add nudity to grab attention. None of these are interesting to talk about, as they don’t have enough mechanics or structure to even notice. However, they do represent a strange niche to me; many games use sex to sell, but these assume that people will buy anything with “hentai” in the name, no matter how bad. Lastly, just like the previous sections, a single group is responsible for an outsized number of them. A full 5 were made by the studio 7miao game and they are some of the most bafflingly weird games I’ve ever seen.
Non-3D Visual Novels: The most interesting trend here was one that would continue through the RPGMaker and traditional game categories: the large number of indie games from East Asia being translated by a few specific Publishers. Most porn games on Steam don’t have a publisher, as they’re usually small indie projects. However, publishers like Mango Party, PlayMeow, Wasabi Entertainment, or Kagura Games had massive libraries of porn games by many different devs, usually visual novels and RPGmaker games. My assumption is that many such games were originally sold at doujinshi conventions before before publishers started translating them for international sale through Steam. However, I’d love to see more research on these groups, especially the Chinese publishers. China is Steam’s second most popular region yet it’s very hard to get any look into their indie dev scene, much less their pornographic scene.
Not all of them were backed by publishers, of course; one game called Once a Porn a Time went for a Disney fairy tale style while another called Feast Manor had the most niche kink I found during my search (feeding/stuffing). A few experimented mechanically in the visual novel space by adding small minigames or stats. Some were even expansive dating sims that could barely be called visual novels. In fact, one of the publishers above (PlayMeow) sells a dating-sim game engine called AcgCreator and publishes the games made with said engine.
RPGMaker: The most notable trend here (aside from what was mentioned above) was the large number of games that were one part of a larger series. In other categories, this seemed more like it was done for sales reasons, but RPGmaker games especially didn’t feel like this. Instead, they felt like they were just one piece of a lengthy, multi-part story. It’s a valuable reminder that porn games are often more than just eroticism; they’re also people trying to tell expansive stories that happen to have sex in them.
Traditional Games: This category was the most interesting to me, as it had the games with the more interesting gameplay and structure. These included a few non-RPGmaker rpgs, one Strip Mahjong game, and a roguelike deckbuilder called Take Me to the Dungeon which was so big it sold a separate SFW edition. There was also a shopkeep game with one of the strangest mechanics I’ve seen ever: you used a complex scrabble-based system to enchant your items. This game, called Love and Enchants, was published by Shady Corner Games, the only major western NSFW publisher I found. I also have to respect impossibly high-scoped jank, and this section had Fight for Eden: HEAT, an attempt at a free indie high fantasy open-world first-person VR RPG. I wish the devs luck.
Miscellaneous: The remaining categories were all small enough to not be notable but still deserve mention. The 7 Barely Qualifying Traditional Games weren’t identically bad like the tile-matchers, still barely cleared the bar of “game” for me. From collectible card games that threw AI generated naked women on their art to bejeweled clones that reward you with a Daz3d sex scene to endless runners that use naked ladies for their models and then reward you with Dazed sex scenes, they barely registered. The 4 Sex Simulators ranged from VR simulators to re-published newgrounds porn, but all shared the same focus on pressing buttons to simulate sexual actions over anything resembling gameplay. 3 Uncategorizable games had steam pages too badly written for me to understand, and the two Non-Games were an interactive porn movie viewer and an expansively featured 3d foot poser for “artistic projects”. Lastly, I was delighted to see one purely text-based Interactive Fiction game - a rarity on steam nowadays.
What was missing from almost every section was LGBT content. I found a few yuri and BL visual novels and a couple of gross “futanari” girl on girl games, but there was nearly nothing that felt marketed towards me as a queer person. I’ve seen such games on steam at other times, but they’re the exceptions, not the majority. When people focus on the lowest common denominator of gamer, representation often gets left behind.
However, there’s 1 final game that I stumbled across during research that really changed my perspective on this project. And that game... isn’t a pornographic game at all.
On June 1st a game called (val)iant, or val’s guide to having a broken vagina came out. This showed up in my searches due to it being tagged “sexual content”, but it isn’t a porn game at all. Rather, it’s a short interactive experience about a non-binary person’s relationship with sex and the way society fails to teach sex ed. It’s an interesting free game, filled with minigames that, for example, compare the futility of talking to an uncaring doctor to playing an impossible game of Tetris with oversized pieces. There’s nothing pornographic about it.
At the same time, it’s important for us to pay attention to what’s going on in such spaces and how they could be dangerous or damaging. Steam’s simplistic algorithms and mediocre tagging systems lump this small, heartfelt expiriment in with some very extreme porn games, and such a categorization can lead a small dev to being ignored, or worse, harassed for being queer. Queer people and minorities exist on platforms like steam as afterthoughts. If we want to make art in such spaces we have to actively curate and understand the platforms as best we can, both the interesting parts and the more... miserable tile matching game parts. I hope that this essay has given you a larger glimpse into such a space. Perhaps Steam isn’t the best platform for adult games, but it’s the most prominent and profitable one, and thus it’s one we have to pay attention to.
Juniper Angel Theory is a programmer, writer, streamer, and bug-of-all-trades who thinks too much about the culture hell we live in. Watch her streams on Twitch, find her shitposting on Cohost, or email her junipertheory2@gmail.com to tell her how smart and pretty she is.
and then wrote about it
this was a lot of work
you should read it
